By the time they brought me into Interview Room B, the rain had already started. I could hear it striking the high windows of the police station in thin, metallic taps, steady as a clock. Oregon rain never sounded dramatic. It wasn't thunderstorm rain, not the kind that rolled across the sky like God losing His temper. It was quieter than that. More patient. The kind of rain that made the world look scrubbed clean while rot kept spreading underneath.

  The room smelled like old coffee, bleach, and whatever they used to wipe blood off linoleum. There was a table bolted to the floor, three chairs, a camera in the upper corner, and a mirror on the wall that pretended not to be a window. Somebody had tried to make the place feel neutral, official, procedural. What it really felt like was a room designed by people who wanted truth but preferred it exhausted, frightened, and sitting under fluorescent lights.

  They sat me down facing the mirror. I looked at myself in it for a moment before the angle swallowed my reflection. Seventeen years old. Black hoodie under a denim jacket gone dark at the shoulders from rain. Split skin along my lower lip. Bruise fading yellow at the edge of my jaw. My right knuckles still scabbed over. I looked exactly like the kind of boy people imagined when they heard the word suspect.

  That was the problem with a face like mine.

  It saved everyone the trouble of thinking.

  Detective Harris came in first. He was in his fifties, broad-shouldered, with a tired face that might once have been handsome if life hadn't filed it down to the grain. He carried a legal pad and a paper cup of coffee and set both on the table as if he had all the time in the world.

  Officer Julia Park followed him in. Younger—early thirties, maybe. Dark hair pulled into a low knot. Sharp eyes. No wedding ring. She didn't carry coffee. She carried a folder thick enough to mean they wanted me to notice it.

  Harris sat across from me. Park took the chair at an angle—not opposite me, not beside me. The soft position. The one meant to suggest conversation instead of combat.

  Neither of them spoke for a few seconds.

  That was deliberate too.

  People hate silence. They rush to fill it with whatever might save them.

  I let it sit there.

  Finally Harris opened the folder and glanced down.

  "Ethan Cole."

  "That's what it says on my birth certificate."

  He lifted his eyes. "You always answer like that?"

  "Only when the question doesn't need asking."

  Officer Park watched me in a way that felt less like suspicion and more like measurement. Some people looked at you to decide whether you were lying. She looked at you to decide what kind of lie you'd choose.

  Harris exhaled through his nose. Not a laugh. Not quite annoyance either.

  "You understand why you're here?"

  I leaned back in the metal chair. "That depends. Are you asking why I'm in a police station, or why you brought me in before I could finish my shift at the grocery store?"

  Park opened the folder.

  "At 12:14 a.m.," she said, "a student from Redwood Hills High School was found dead on school grounds. Female. Seventeen. Olivia Carter."

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  She let the name hang in the room.

  If she expected me to flinch, she was disappointed.

  I looked down at the table. Scratches cut across the laminate where someone had dragged a handcuff chain back and forth until the pattern sliced through the fake wood grain. Somebody anxious. Somebody angry. Somebody who'd wanted to leave a mark on something.

  "You said found," I said finally. "That mean you're not sure what happened yet?"

  Harris slid a photograph across the table.

  I didn't touch it. I didn't need to.

  Police floodlights. Yellow tape. Wet concrete shining under rain. Beyond it, the shadowed mouth of the old girls' locker room behind the east gym—the one they kept locked because asbestos had been found in the walls years ago. In front of it lay a body under a white sheet stained dark where the rain had soaked through.

  A pair of white sneakers stuck out from the bottom.

  Expensive ones. Olivia's.

  For a second—only a second—something cold moved through my chest.

  Not grief.

  Not shock.

  Recognition.

  Like hearing the final note of a song that had been building in the distance for months.

  "You know her," Harris said.

  Everybody in Redwood Hills knew Olivia Carter. She moved through the halls the way some girls wore perfume—she lingered after she passed. Blonde, beautiful, rich enough that teachers pronounced her last name with care. Student body president. Varsity lacrosse. A three-point-nine GPA floating on top of copied homework and administrators who preferred donors to principles.

  Her father chaired the school board.

  Her mother ran charity galas where people drank white wine and discussed literacy while kids like me stocked grocery shelves under fluorescent lights until midnight.

  Olivia was the kind of girl adults described as exceptional.

  Kids like me had another word.

  "Yeah," I said. "I know her."

  Park flipped a page in the folder.

  "Witnesses place you with Olivia Carter shortly before midnight."

  "Witnesses," I said. "Plural. That sounds serious."

  "We have footage."

  "Even better."

  Harris placed another photograph on the table—grainy security footage stamped 11:47 p.m. A girl stood beneath the parking-lot light, rain shining on the pavement around her. Beside her was a taller figure.

  Me.

  I studied the image.

  "Bad angle," I said. "Makes me look guilty."

  Harris didn't smile.

  "Where were you going?"

  "Nowhere."

  "You expect us to believe that?"

  "I expect you to prove otherwise."

  Park leaned forward slightly.

  "Ethan, Olivia Carter is dead."

  "And?"

  "And you were the last person seen with her."

  "That sounds like a scheduling issue, not a confession."

  Harris flattened his hand over the photograph.

  "Let's start again," he said quietly. "Tell us why Olivia Carter called you out to the east lot after curfew."

  There it was.

  Not Did you meet her?

  Not Were you there?

  Why did she call you?

  So they already knew about the texts.

  The rain had thinned to mist by the time I left the station.

  The steps outside shone wet beneath the streetlights. Across the street a news van idled with its lights off, waiting for something worth filming.

  I pulled up my hood and started walking.

  Redwood Hills lay ten blocks away—past the diner, past the pharmacy, past the church with the blue-letter sign promising GRACE FOR THE WEARY. The school sat on a low hill above town, glowing faintly in the rain like something expensive and innocent.

  From a distance, it always looked respectable.

  That was its best trick.

  I cut through Miller Park instead of taking the road. The path followed the river, black and swollen with rain. Branches clicked overhead. My shoes sank into wet gravel.

  Halfway across the footbridge, my phone vibrated.

  One message.

  Unknown number.

  No text.

  Just an image.

  The photo showed the inside of a school locker—narrow, painted blue. A geometry book on the bottom shelf. A gray hoodie hanging from the hook.

  And taped to the back wall, barely visible in shadow—

  a pink burner phone.

  Below the image appeared one line:

  You should have checked your locker again.

  I stared at the screen until it dimmed.

  Then I looked up toward the hill where Redwood Hills High waited in the mist.

  Somewhere behind those brick walls, more than one secret had survived the night.

  And for the first time since Olivia Carter was carried out under a white sheet, I felt something close to fear.

  Not for myself.

  For whoever had just reminded me that the game was still in motion.

  I slid the phone back into my pocket and kept walking.

  Above the river, the rain began again.

  Heavier this time.